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Flightsim PC

Below I'm parked at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport at gate E17. The catering and cleaning vehicles are provided by Aerosoft Airport Enhancement Services (AES).

Below I'm parked at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport gate D04, flight BA0433, almost ready to board passengers for the dayly 18:00 hours flight to London Heathrow. It is end of the (business) day so a heavy jet like the Boeing 767 is being used for this short haul flight.

Below a screen shot of the VC panel of the Level-D 767-300 waiting at Amsterdam (EHAM) holding point S7 for runway 24 (LINU1S departure).

Note that I only use the VC panel to give me the feeling of flying. I use my own hardware to operate the controls.

And a little bit later in time I was allowed to enter runway 24, cleared for take-off (the Schiphol Tower is visible to the right).

Below a screen shot of landing at EHAM rwy 06. Look at the very realistic A4 and A5 motorways with moving vehicles to the left...

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NvidiaInspector

I use the NVIDIA-inspector tool to improve the quality of the FSX screen. With this tool you will finally get Anti Aliasing working, so you will get nice straight lines. Shimmering effects will be gone.

Here are my Settings, read more about that in this thread:

With these AA settings the memory used tops at 1160MB, fits nicely in my Video Card memory of 1280MB. Note that I'm not using BUFFERPOOLS in fsx.cfg, FSX is writing directly in the Driver memory. I have to watch out that memory used does not become higher then 1280MB, otherwise I have to switch back to 8x (which also looks very good).

A very interesting new feature of NVIDIA Inspector is the built in Frame Rate Limiter; no more need for an external limiter.

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FSX Settings

Microsoft Flight Simulator X, or FSX, is the tenth and propably the last Flight Simulator release from Microsoft. Although already 5 years at the market it is still a demanding program wrt to PC hardware....

How you set your sliders in FSX will have an impact on Frames per Second. "Putting all sliders to the max" is only possible for high end systems. My FSX settings are:

Note: Anti-aliasing is not set here but in the nvidiaInspector tool controlling the driver for my video card.

Note: I do not use Autogen, I fly a heavy jet in IFR, so the only scenery parts that have to look real are the Airports. It saves me FPS.

Note: The Cloud draw distance is set 10 nm below the maximum upper visibility (100) in the weather program ASE for a smooth horizon transition:

Note: I do not want to see AI aircraft, just the VATSIM aircraft (of other virtual pilots particpating) that will be injected into FSX by SquawkBox4. I also do not like to see Aircraft labels blinking above VATSIM aircraft.

Land and sea traffic: just 5% Road vehicles will do, it generates more then enough traffic.

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FSX.CFG

I will detail a few of my FSX.CFG settings that are important for the FPS (Frames Per Second):

[JOBSCHEDULER]
AffinityMask=14

This setting (for my i5 2500K, a quad-core with no hyperthreading) will force FSX to run at core 1 (main), cores 2 and 3 (texture loaders) while core 0 is being used by Windows 7, SIOC, lekseecon and the fibers of FSX. Note that if you have a quad core with hyperthreading such as the i7 2600 you need a different mask.

[BufferPools]
UsePools=0
PoolSize=0

With my fast VGA card with plenty of memory I do not need a ringbuffer between FSX and the driver for the video card. FSX will write directly into the driver which saves cpu cycles. I only have to watch out that the Video Memory at my card is sufficient. Note: you can only apply these tweaks if your memory card has >= 1Gb memory.

[GRAPHICS]
ForceFullScreenVSync=0
ForceWindowedVSync=0
HIGHMEMFIX=1
See_Self=1

The VSync settings are the important tweaks! These settings in combination with "Vertical sync = Use the 3D Application setting" in NvidiaInspector will almost double the FPS (I went from 15-20 to 30 in Virtual Cockpit view...)

The HIGHMEMFIX is also very important for your FPS.

See_Self has no effect on FPS, but without you will not see the aircraft lights shining at the runway from within the cockpit ...

[SCENERY]
SmallPartRejectRadius=4.0
MAX_ASYNC_BATCHING_JOBS=2

Max batchjobs is in line with AffinityMask 14. There are two cores that can handle asynchronous jobs.

[TERRAIN]
SWAP_WAIT_TIMEOUT=2

This is tied to TextureMaxLoad below.

[Display]
TextureMaxLoad=30
WideViewAspect=True

WideViewAspect has no effect on FPS but is needed to adapt for a Wide Screen monitor.

[Main]
FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION=0.1

Maybe you can leave the FFTF out completely, is not of much use with a multi core cpu.

Bojote has made an on-line Teaking and Tuning tool for your fsx.cfg, you can find it here.

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Level-D 767 settings

The Level-D 767 (for FS9 or FSX) is one of the top add-ons for Microsoft Flight Simulator. Even real pilots use it to practise procedures.

My settings are:

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FSUIPC

FSUIPC4 from Pete Dowson is a famous software package for Microsoft Flight Simulator. I use it to calibarate and control my Flight Controls and for the Push To Talk button. I also use a few FSUIPC offsets, not many, because I interace with the Level-D 767 via my lekseecon software and the Level-D SDK.

Some of my FSUIPC4 settings are:

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SimConnect at Flightsim PC

SimConnect was introduced by Microsoft in the FSX version as a new and neat way to let other programs (also at other PC's) communicate with FSX. Examples of such programs are Squawkbox4, FSUIPC4 and ASE.

Configuring SimConnect correctly is very important. Below you'll find my SimConnect.xml from folder C:\Users\"You"\Appdata\Roaming\Microsoft\FSX (in Win 7):

And the SimConnect.ini file from the 'Flight Simulator X Files' folder in Documents (in Win 7):

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Ultimate Traffic 2 Aircraft

I have installed the Ultimate Traffic 2 aircraft (2.9 Gb) in my SimObjects folder. (Note that I have just installed the aircraft, not the functionality of Ultimate Traffic 2 such as schedules, ai trafic, and so on).

The reason is because VATSIM member Jesus Altuve has created a simple yet effective program SMSCreator to allow SB4 users to inject their AI models into VATSIM.

SMSCreator creates a .sms file for SquawkBox 4, that will display the correct model/livery when flying online. SB4 will now use my Ultimate Traffic 2 aircraft as much as possible and make them visible while flying online! It will drastically reduce the number of (boring) VIP or Paper Planes!

Download the SMSCreator here. Help is available in the VATSIM Squawkbox Help forum or the SquawkBox Forum.

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